Apparently, Ecuador is graced with all four seasons in the course of a single day, and so I pack for none. Instead, I throw a random selection of clothing in a small duffel bag, stuffing a bikini and a fleece vest into the pocket of negative space that appears when I zip it. A sense of satisfaction washes over me as I force-feed nylon straps through plastic teeth. There’s no reason for me to feel satisfied. You need many more items than the ones I have chosen for a day at the beach or a circumnavigation of Greenland. But I have made a habit of underpacking, of escorting aspirational accessories around the globe as if they were children on a disastrous family trip.
“You wanted to see Miami?” I put a straw hat on a glass coffee table where it will stay untouched until I repack it. “There, now you’ve seen it.”
My aversion to overpacking and its uptight cousin, overplanning, stems from the belief that neither tendency is a fake problem. These are not amusing tics. They are instead reflections on the personality of the packer. They suggest a dubiousness of other lifestyles (racist), a conviction that the world won’t have what you need (princess), and a lack of faith that you’ll continue being human when it doesn’t (misanthrope). And how hard is it, really? I think by now we can all agree that the foundation of world travel goes something like “Bring a cardigan.”
Thusly armed with my meager tributes to a four-in-one climate, I lift my bag. My bicep aches from yesterday’s visitors: a series of offensively long needles. I am off to Quito, the capital of Ecuador, because a travel magazine has told me to go there. My nebulous mission is to wander around the city for a few days, interact with locals, and write about it. It’s a dream assignment for anyone and I have never been to South America. Thus, I find it to be extra dreamy.
Because I am the temporary ward of a media company, I am advised to seek out multiple inoculations, including one for typhus. It’s all fun and games until someone gets typhus. I am also encouraged to pick up a prescription for malaria pills should I venture farther afield. Quito isn’t Tokyo, no, but it’s a major city with running water. The quotidian equivalent of such precautions would have me being one of those people who spray hand sanitizer on subway poles.
“Is this really necessary?” I ask my editor, who points out how difficult things will be for me if I get sick and can’t communicate.
“You don’t speak Spanish.”
“I hablo un poco de espan-yoal,” I defend myself.
“Uh-huh,” he says.
* * *
Few instances in my life have made me feel so tough as helping the Duane Reade pharmacist locate my malaria pills.
“What are we looking for, hon?” she shouts over her shoulder, thumbing her way through a bin of pills and creams for normal-people problems.
Chain-store pharmacists put exactly as much effort into patient privacy as I do into packing. Until they invent a Libido Dampening syrup or a capsule for Being Too Darn Pretty, this will be the only time I’ll proudly announce the contents of my envelope to all the land. A line forms behind me. I feign shyness at the impressed glances of my fellow customers. They wouldn’t have pegged me as a war photographer or an aid worker but oh, how wrong they are.
Both the pills and the shots wind up bolstering my sense of adventure, my desire to take my body out for a spin. As if I am dealing with extra minutes on a phone plan, not my immune system. Use it or lose it! I wish I could apply this attitude to my daily life, but I’m a lazy person within the confines of New York City. I won’t meet a friend more than ten blocks from my apartment if it’s too windy and the sidewalks are looking especially hard today. I am skeptical of ferries and bus transfers. Often I will walk past a restaurant and have the thought: I should order out from there later.
But the whole point of this trip is to leave it to chance. Well, chance and Facebook. Unlike casting a social net for tips on Dublin or Buenos Aires, where comment after comment would compete in an e-thumb war for supreme regional wisdom, people are content to deliver their advice regarding Quito in direct messages. Few have spent quality time there. Three people chime in. One suggests a restaurant with fruit drinks, one suggests a museum with paintings of skeletons, and the third suggests I climb Cotopaxi, a 20,000-foot active volcano. Dubious of the Wi-Fi in my budget hotel (racist), I type up the list in advance: fruit drink, skeleton paintings, active volcano. Got it. I hold the list in my hand as I lock my apartment door. Each activity seems equally viable. Looking back, I think it’s because they were all in the same point-size type.
* * *
Now feels like as good a time as any to mention that I’ve never been skiing. You have to be under four feet tall to see the appeal of skiing. When you’re a kid, there are magic bravery crystals on the surface of the snow that whisper, telling you it’s fun to go speeding down nature’s backbone as if it won’t kill you. After a certain age, you become too tall to hear the crystals. So by the time you’re an adult, the question “Want to go skiing next weekend?” actually sounds like “Want to go bungee jumping using this old dental floss I just found?” The big selling points for ski trips, or the ones most regularly paraded out for my unskilled benefit, are mugs of warm liquid. Wait. Let me get this straight: While all my friends exercise, bond, and embrace the outdoors, my reward for a hard day of solo snowman crafting is more hot chocolate? To what do I owe this glut of me-time? Maybe later, when I grow bored of lying on rugs, I can wander into town and spin postcard racks. No, no winter sporting expeditions for me, thank you.
Upon arriving in Quito, I solicit the advice of my hotel’s Peruvian receptionist, a shock-pretty university student whose affections I like to think I have won. This I have achieved by waiting patiently while other guests ask stupid questions and then asking brilliant ones of my own. Like how to flush the toilet in my room. When not manning the front desk, booking expeditions to the Galápagos Islands, the receptionist likes to climb mountains. This turns out to be common in Quito. The capital is located in a goose pot of one of the most densely collected circles of peaks on the planet, including Cayambe, Cotopaxi, the fun-to-say Pichincha, and the fluid-looking Imbabura, with its mystical importance. The Incas used to worship it. Imbabura is Zen in rock form. It’s also not the one I intend to climb.
When I tell her of my interest in climbing Cotopaxi, a massive landform I apparently can’t be bothered to google, she seems unfazed. She went last month. The volcano has a symmetrical crater like a punch bowl in clouds. It’s one of the most stunning things she’s ever seen. Why wouldn’t I go? Looking at a photograph of her and her boyfriend tacked to the wall behind her—both of them wearing head-to-toe North Face and holding up ice axes from which all the power of the universe emanates—I decide to play up my ignorance.
I explain that I am a novice climber, by which I mean very. It’s a miracle I haven’t spontaneously fallen to the floor in the time we’ve been speaking. I point at her phone and encourage her to pull up a photograph of the mountain I used to hike every summer in New Hampshire. It’s the most frequently climbed mountain in North America. I was nine years old the first time I went up. I used to play freeze tag on the summit.
“Is the mountain on the next page?”
She is genuinely confused, moving the screen closer to her face, trying to broaden the image with her fingers.
“Exactly,” I say.
Convinced of my greenness, she knows just the person to escort me up the mountain, a friend of hers named Edgardo. Edgardo is a professional mountaineer, in that sometimes apparel brands send him parkas. Which is good enough for me, as I have been sent no parkas. He doesn’t usually do beginner tours but he “is a climber who is a very good climber.”
A few phone calls later and Edgardo is set to arrive the next morning. He has agreed to take me up Cotopaxi for a reasonable fee. At this point I know so little about mountain climbing that I don’t think I’m skimping by avoiding a more official expedition. Actually, it’s the reverse—I reason I must be paying more than normal to limit my stranger quotient. In fact, before she suggested Edgardo, I asked the receptionist if I couldn’t just handle the trip on my own. I had designs on trading the forced loneliness of nonfluency for the intentional loneliness of nature immersion. I imagined glacial streams and wildflowers, salamanders and roots. Whatever I thought, it has since been corrected. Painted over. Like Dogs Playing Poker.
* * *
When Edgardo shows, I am sitting in silence with the few other foreign guests dotting the spare hotel dining room. The soft morning light shines through the spikes atop the security gate outside. I am pretending to read a Spanish newspaper and polishing off a breakfast of corn and eggs, when a petite man darts across the room wearing what appears to be the mountain climber’s answer to the scuba suit. A coarse braid of hair swings over one of his shoulders. The braid is so thin at the end, I am amazed its owner managed such a delicate procedure.
Edgardo carries with him a strappy backpack and plops himself down across from me. My coffee sloshes onto the table. I can feel it drip through the cracks in the wood and onto my knee. But I sit still, holding the newspaper, using it as a shield. Every set of eyes in the room watches Edgardo lean back in the chair like he owns it.
“Is your name Sloane?”
No.
“Yes.”
“Do you eat beans?”
This is one of maybe five questions Edgardo will ask me in the entire time I know him. The first being the confirmation of my name. I nod.
“Good,” he says. “I’ll get the things and we meet outside in one hour.”
And that is the longest string of English I’ll hear from Edgardo. It’s as if he memorized it for effect, same as if the only sentence I knew how to say in Spanish was “This remote control only takes double-A batteries.”
“Okay,” I say.
He pushes his chair back from the table.
“One hour,” he repeats, holding up his pointer finger in a stern fashion as if he knows I have an issue with lateness. Because I do, in fact, have an issue with lateness, this otherwise rude assumption has a positive impact. I feel like Edgardo and I have known each other forever.
“Got it,” I say.
“Oh.” Edgardo stops himself and removes a pair of mountain-climbing boots from his backpack. “We need to understand your feet.”
He drops to the ground as if about to propose and grabs my ankle. A couple at the next table looks the other way. Despite their clunky shape, the boots are too small. We’ll have to add “boots” to the list of things to rent before we go—a list that evidently includes crampons, a Gore-Tex jumpsuit, and a headlamp. I am starting to detect the faintest odor of intensity to all this.
“Is what I’m wearing okay?”
I push back from my chair and wipe crumbs off my lap. I am wearing cotton tights and a pilled tank top. It’s less of an outfit than a few swaths of cloth to carry me from my room to a public dining room in a socially acceptable fashion.
“Yes, yes,” he says. “One hour.”
I go back to my room and locate the warmest clothing I can find, which amounts to the fleece vest. I lock my passport in a counterintuitively communal safe, operated by a janitor. Then, just as I’m getting ready to leave, I feel an ache in my abdomen. I go to the bathroom to find that there’s both a Cotomaxi joke and a crampon joke to be made—but no one around to get it.
* * *
Edgardo arrives outside the hotel three hours later. When he pulls up, I see that his Jeep features an orange-and-red flame extending from door to bumper and blacked-out windows. He fusses with a tarp on top of the Jeep, pulling hard at ropes. When I ask him if I can help, he says nothing. When I ask him if he’s sure I can’t help, he tells me I should get in the car—but not before looking me up and down and asking: This is what you wear?
I open the passenger door, expecting the car to be empty. But a second man reclines in the back of the Jeep. It would seem the “we” that needed to understand my feet was not royal but literal. This second man I will come to know as Pedro. Pedro’s primary contributions to our journey include pointing out gas stations, eating massive quantities of fruit, sleeping with his arms crossed, and pulling off Oakleys. He nods as I climb into the passenger seat. A small hill of orange peels at my feet, along with a warmth emanating from my seat fabric, tells me that Pedro’s perch in the backseat is a recently acquired one.
“That’s my assistant,” Edgardo explains over my shoulder.
Both of them laugh. I know in my heart the joke is about their friendship and not my soon-to-be-unsolved murder case, but my unease regarding a second person operates on two levels. The first is the one in which I’m in no mood to be kidnapped in a foreign country. The second is the one in which I refuse to pay double. It’s hard to say which is more pressing. I sit in the car as Edgardo straps supplies to the roof. A first-aid kit comes loose and pops open. The windshield is showered with plastic matches and energy bars. Band-Aids flutter and stick to the glass. Edgardo and I lock eyes. He smiles, picks up a six-inch hunting knife, and shoves it back into the bag.
Trips up Cotopaxi work like this: First, you drive out of Quito, a city whose traffic patterns mirror those of a cubist painting. Once on the outskirts of town, it’s another few hours to the base of Cotopaxi. During this time, there are many road types at your disposal. Wide ones, short ones, narrow ones, steep ones, long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, HAIR! Anyway. You will find one road so bumpy, you’ll want to keep your jaw ajar so your teeth don’t chatter. Boxy pastel houses are sprinkled on the hills in the distance. Soon the towns decrease in size. The crumbling apartment buildings fade from view. The clotheslines become less and less covered in clothes. Keep on vibrating up a “road” whose air quotes grow increasingly pronounced. Try not to listen as your bladder curses the day you dragged it into this world. Hold on to the handle above your window and—hey, watch out for that donkey!—swerve your vehicle straight into a river. Stop the car. Realize it’s not really a river you’re in, but a swamp saved from stagnation by an open sewage pipe. Lift any electronics off the car floor because you’re about to open your door into bacteria-infested rain-forest water. Quickly come to understand that you weigh exactly enough to be of use by exiting the car but too little to be of use pushing it back onto the road.
So just stand there for a while. Distract yourself from whatever it is that just bit your neck by humming the theme song to Family Ties. Realize that you know only two lines of this song and one of them is “sha-la-la-la.” Once back in the car, go through the gate to Cotopaxi National Park. From here, it’s a short drive to the last patch of land not at a 90-degree angle from the earth. Park the car and hike up to a cabin located 15,700 feet above sea level. Upon arrival, eat as much as you possibly can before the altitude destroys your appetite. Then make sure you’re asleep by 7 p.m. so that you can wake up five hours later and hike to the summit before the sun rises, melting the path out from under you.
Now, I have to assume that much of that reads as par for the course for an experienced climber. I wouldn’t know. I was not she and the decision to spend thirty-six hours up a glacier-encrusted mountain instead of bargaining for alpaca scarves had been a minor one. But even if I had gone the scarf route, the constant state of newness in a foreign country lends a little drama to everything. Even the maiden operation of a local ATM demands problem-solving. It becomes increasingly difficult to parse personal adventure from objective adventure, until you’re certain everything should be a challenge, every path a learning curve. It is only later that someone native to the region hears you decided to ride a bicycle to the airport, laughs, and says: Not that steep of a curve.
* * *
Lush green hills look patchy and weighted down. Drops of rain pelt my forehead from a crack in the Jeep’s window. We have under an hour to go, according to Edgardo. This is a relief as Edgardo’s musical taste leans toward German rap, which, for reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has heard German rap, makes me feel less like we’re on a road trip and more like we’re in a postapocalyptic novel. The music doesn’t stray too far from this genre except for a few plays of Ace of Base’s “The Sign,” a track I pretend holds emotional significance in order to get Edgardo to skip it.
Twenty minutes later, Edgardo pulls off the highway without warning, stops the car, and runs away on foot. Perhaps this is normal. Perhaps Americans are unnecessarily diligent about telling each other where we’re going all the time. If I hear a funny noise in the engine, I say, “Do you hear that?” I don’t just stop the car, get out, and leave everyone inside thinking I’ve embarked on a one-man game of Chinese fire drill. Or if you and I are having a discussion at a party and I have to go to the bathroom, I excuse myself. I don’t dart off like a startled horse. I’m not the kind of person who’s going to, say, pull over unannounced and go searching for weed in a random village while an overly inquisitive but otherwise tolerable American tourist waits in my car.
I have no idea what this little pit stop has to do with getting to Cotopaxi. Pedro popped out of the vehicle almost as fast as Edgardo, so he’s not even here to give me inscrutable looks. The gas tank is full. Maybe it’s not weed. Maybe Edgardo has to pick up a quilt his grandmother made him or something. I look around. The landscape outside features chickens, torn advertisements for soda, men leaning against walls, and shirtless children. A soldier strolls by with a large gun strapped to his back.
I push down on the door lock. Then I pull it up again.
I shut my eyes. When I was four years old I came down with pneumonia and hallucinated that my room was packed with bees. To avoid getting stung, I took refuge in the safest place I knew: under the covers. But of course there were bees there as well. Being inside or outside of the Jeep feels like the same kind of choice.
Bored, I open the glove compartment to find a pile of scratched CDs, ratty gloves, and some travel-size spray cologne. I pick up the cologne. It has the silhouette of a boob on it and rust on the bottom and I am not even tempted to remove the cap. I get out of the car and lean on it, which makes me feel like a prostitute but I don’t mind. I reason that prostitutes seem more in control than already kidnapped women locked in a car. A chicken runs by with a couple of kids following behind. Easily distracted from her own survival, the chicken stops to peck at a half-eaten paper plate of food.
When Edgardo and Pedro finally return, Edgardo succinctly instructs me to get back in the car and tosses a large bottle of water on my lap. Quito is not Tokyo, no, but it is not Khartoum, either. There is absolutely no way it takes this long to locate bottled water. I raise one eyebrow at him. If drugs have been introduced to this vehicle, I think I’ve earned some.
“Drink,” he says, adding, as I open the bottle, “you will need on the mountain.”
I pull the bottle from my lips like it’s poison.
“Do I drink the water now or do I not drink the water now?”
“Now drink,” he says, starting the car.
I unscrew the cap again.
“Drink on the mountain.”
I have seen many films with scenes like this. I don’t need to be part of one myself. If Cast Away, 127 Hours, Alive, Touching the Void, and Panic Room have taught me anything, it’s that you should never leave home without a lighter, a bottle of Gatorade, and a Swiss Army knife. At this point, people who do leave the house without an EpiPen basically deserve what’s coming to them. But the survival stuff is never the worst part of these movies. The worst part is those innocuous scenes, before the epic journey, the ones that appear to have nothing to do with anything. Chop off my arm, feed me butt cheek, lock me in a room with Jodie Foster—these will never be the moments that move me as a viewer. It’s when our hero or heroine thinks longingly of some basic household staple that my stomach lurches. Nothing is so gruesome to the human imagination as regret.
I drain the bottle down to the plastic rib equidistant between the top and the bottom.
Soon there are no more towns to be found and no more donkeys to be avoided. We drive over lava-worn ground. Wild dogs appear from nowhere and run after the car, barking. It starts to rain harder. The sky blends into the clouds blends into the ice blends into the rocks. Cold air whips through a crack in the dashboard. I worry about my clothing. But if I ask too many questions, Edgardo tells me to be “tranquilo.” He isolates the word for effect, simply saying “calm,” not bothering with the “yourself.” I know nothing about Ecuadorian culture, but I’m betting that treating a woman like a hysteric for asking about long underwear does not go over well.
“Pichincha.” Edgardo points across my chest, breaking the silence.
“I see,” I say.
Pedro reaches silently through from the backseat and offers me pistachio nuts. I shake my head. He shrugs and keeps eating. We park the car at an adobe-style house complete with a stone path. It’s bare-bones, but at this point any evidence of human intent registers as luxurious. We haul our belongings—which for me includes a backpack stuffed with an old sleeping bag of Pedro’s, climbing equipment, beans, and a chocolate bar—over our shoulders. I push a wooden door and poke my head into the house. I see a musty rug, a small kitchen, and a ladder leading up to a floor covered in hay. It’s somehow colder inside than out and smells of mildew. Pedro comes in behind me. He looks up at the rafters, puts his hands on his hips, and whistles appreciatively.
Edgardo appears behind us.
“We cannot stay here.”
“Looks fine to me,” I say, fishing in my pack for toilet paper.
I am fond of this role reversal.
“We must go to the refuge,” he says plainly and glares at Pedro, who should know better.
Apparently, we are trespassers. This little hacienda is not our destination. It costs quite a bit of money to rent and other people have done that already. This evening’s destination is another 1,200 feet up and we will be climbing there on foot. The only reason we stopped here is because Edgardo thought this might be a good spot to layer up.
I unfurl two pairs of snow pants, a sweater, and my fleece vest from my backpack but I am having trouble with the boots. Exasperated, Edgardo grabs my leg, one hand behind the knee and the other on the boot, quickly forcing me to sit on a stone bench. He starts lacing up the boots for me. This would verge on maternal if it weren’t the most violent corset-style lacing session of all time. I don’t know what kind of mother Edgardo had. Mine used to take a heart-shaped cookie cutter to my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
* * *
“Here is where we get out,” Edgardo says, firmly.
It’s beyond me how anyone could discern “parking space” from where we’ve stopped. The rain has turned to snow that comes from beneath the car as much as from above it. No one expected a snowstorm but apparently this one doesn’t look so bad. I am awash with the impulse to be back in New York in my apartment, imagining it in mid-July when it’s too hot to go outside and the first sign of rain is a hollow tapping on the air-conditioning unit. I am freezing already, a fact that Edgardo can’t quite believe, despite the purple hue of my lips. I have been backed into trusting him through circumstance. Like a doctor–patient relationship, no matter how extreme my doubt, he is the only one to tell me what’s normal. The closest second opinion is five hours and 5,000 vertical feet away. I unbuckle my seat belt. I think that I have never been so cold in my life but try to rid myself of thoughts like this. There’s nowhere to go but up.
“Your hands are too cold,” Edgardo observes as he watches me not get out of the car.
I am vigorously rubbing my palms together. I would stick them in my mouth if I wasn’t worried about the consequences of them being wet when I removed them. Edgardo reaches across me to open the glove compartment. I want to hug him for warmth. This is hard to reconcile, since the more I get to know Edgardo, the less I want to hug him in general. Maybe what I really want is to gut him Jack London–style and use his kidneys for mittens. We smile politely at each other. He pockets the can of cologne. I’m not sure whom he’s planning on attracting in a frozen volcano crater. Pedro, meanwhile, goes bounding out of the car, all joints and momentum. The prospect of warmth moves me to follow him. I heave my backpack on and try to keep up.
Edgardo yells after Pedro to slow down. I am like an animal too stupid to know to do this myself. Like those parakeets who have to have their cages covered so they know it’s time to sleep. I don’t know it yet, but with no climbing experience and less than twenty-four hours at 10,000 feet above sea level, I will most likely pass out from speed-hiking. But right now I feel okay, almost chatty, for a whole minute before my heart starts banging in earnest. I take advantage of the howling wind to pant as audibly as I wish.
The ground is covered in layers of thick snow that yield to a second layer of volcanic ash. It looks like crumbled Oreo cookies and provides about as much resistance. There’s the occasional flat rock to step on, which helps, but it’s the low visibility that’s stealing the show. I see no sign of this alleged second shelter. When I shout to Edgardo, asking him where the refuge is, I am told it’s in a little place called “Tranquilo.”
I can feel my heart pounding against polyester, trying to escape from my rib cage. I take my thumbs and lean them against the chest strap from the inside to relieve some of the pressure. What has two thumbs and can’t feel either of them? This gal! Edgardo waits about thirty feet ahead of me with one foot up on a rock, as I huff and puff to shorten the distance between us. His befuddlement at my pace feels genuine. Pedro has been granted permission to go on without us. I can only imagine how that conversation went. Just go, man. I’ll deal with this bag of pasteurized milk bones.
* * *
Turns out the reason I needed to conserve water is because there is no water in the refuge. Correction: there is water in a barrel by the toilets, but it’s reserved for washing away feces. If we want drinking water, we will have to heat snow and then cool it. The irony here being that this is because one of the pipes is frozen.
On the ground floor of the refuge, there is a large space filled with booths that look exactly like the ski trip booths of my nightmares, as well as one inexplicably padlocked cabinet filled with bottles of Fiji water. Someone or someones had to do what I just did but while carting a giant glass door on their backs. They probably had to go back down for the padlock. Now it’s taking about ten minutes to fill one pot and there are three burners for the fifteen people already here. And by people, I mean people with penises. Barring any surprises, I appear to be the only woman around. This is a coincidence. Just last night, a guide from Seattle tells me, there were two female climbers staying at the refuge.
What I can’t understand is how he would possibly know this information. How long has he been here? Does he live here? If he lives here, should he not have figured out how to get into the goddamn cabinet by now?
It turns out he and his fellow climbers have been acclimatizing at the refuge for two days. They have also ascended a couple of “minor mountains” in Peru in preparation for this one.
“That’s funny,” I say, even though it’s not. “I got here last night.”
“I thought you guys just arrived,” the guide says, gesturing at Pedro.
He is untangling a pile of ropes across the room, a whole apple in his mouth.
“Nope.” I am still watching Pedro. “I flew into Quito yesterday.”
The guide’s eyes widen. He asks if I’m on a medication called Diamox, which prevents altitude sickness by quickening the heart and thinning the blood. I am on no such medication. I have never even heard of it. I know that coca leaves are often chewed at Machu Picchu to prevent altitude sickness. I also know that Machu Picchu rests on a midget of a mountain, clocking in at under 8,000 feet. What should make me wary does make me wary. But despite my fear, it also fills me with pride. Preventive medication is for sissies. Me? I have the red blood cells of a goddamn Sherpa.
* * *
The idea of men traveling to push themselves to the limit is a culturally familiar one. Not every man hears the call of the wild, but those who do—the Krakauers and the Jungers—are not startled by the ringing. There is something inherently manly about climbing a mountain. Though, taken literally, that would make a deep-sea dive the most feminine activity on the planet. Perhaps it’s less directly correlated to gender and more that mountaineering allows men to try on an idolized extension of their daily selves. Here is the prize for which a certain kind of man has been aiming with every beer chugged, every Super Bowl watched, every video game won, every drunken piggyback ride given to a one-hundred-pound girl. And now it’s time to let the machismo run amok. You’re on top of the world! Drink a shot of gasoline! Punch a bird! For women, to be on a mountain (assuming you’re not a professional mountain climber) is not an extension of stereotypical behavior but a break from it. Therefore, to be part of a successful mountain-climbing expedition, it’s important to play against the worst assumptions about one’s own gender. Do this by being okay with more or less everything. Never refer to the pile of excrement on the outhouse floor as “icky.” Try to avoid weeping when you feel your life may be in danger.
“I can’t believe you’re climbing this after one day,” says a doctor from Baltimore, part of the Seattle hiker’s team.
He translates for the third member of their party, a Chilean, who is so impressed he repeats it.
“Un día!”
At which point Edgardo, having just returned from the stove with a steaming pot of ramen noodles, gives the group a wave of his finger. He proceeds to rapidly debate with the doctor’s Chilean friend.
“He says that this is not true.” The doctor’s translation has a five-second delay. “He says you have been in Quito for a week.”
I grab his arm.
“Who said that?”
“Edgardo,” says the doctor, eyes fixed on Edgardo’s mouth as he speaks to me, “says you told him this.”
Edgardo and I lock eyes. I look to him as a toddler looks at a parent, checking to see if this skinned knee is worth crying over. Should I flip out about this misunderstanding or not? But his face is inconclusive. He only shrugs optimistically. The doctor tries to comfort me. He explains that altitude sickness is unpredictable. There’s nothing that says I’ll definitely get it. Then again, there’s nothing that says I won’t.
I sit down and inhale as deeply as I can, which isn’t very. The city of Quito, without even trying, is 9,000 feet above sea level. The friend who recommended I go see skeleton paintings is a playwright who came down with altitude sickness for eighteen hours upon landing. The friend who recommended I climb Cotopaxi did not. When I recount this story months later over a sea-level glass of wine, this second friend will remind me that he is a world traveler and Australian and that he told me climbing Cotopaxi was going to be “bloody hard.”
“When we say something’s hard, we mean it.”
The question now is: Do I have theater geek lungs or Australian lungs?
“Tranquilo,” Edgardo offers, putting his hand on my shoulder. “All will be fine.”
I go outside into the crisp germ-free air and swallow a malaria pill with a fistful of snow. Up until now, my idea of coping with changes in atmospheric pressure was a nice big yawn. I look around at the fading outlines of the neighboring mountains. It’s almost 7 p.m. I have five hours to mainline noodles and try to sleep before we head out. This I do in silence, coming back inside and sitting at a booth across from Edgardo and Pedro. There is nothing but the sound of wind and slurping.
* * *
Up a flight of narrow wooden stairs are a series of Holocaust beds. I wish there was a better means of describing them but rarely have I seen something that looks so much like something else. It’s as if The Brady Bunch were filmed in Nazi Germany and we’re spending the night on set. There’s a flurry of multilingual whisper-shouting as climbing partners bid each other good night in the semidarkness. I heave my backpack onto the top of an unoccupied bunk and it bounces on the mattress.
“I sleep downstairs,” says Edgardo, who will never explain why this is, “but I keep my pack here.”
“Sounds fine,” I say, fiddling with the zippers on my backpack.
I’m not mad at him, not really. My predicament could have been easily avoided with some minimal research on my part. I know that one day I will be relieved that I had not seen a photograph of Cotopaxi prior to being located on it. Because if I had, I never would have come. One day I will try to remember but ultimately forget feeling as sick as I’m about to feel. I’ll just think: Here is something I did. But right now, looking at the clusters of confident climbers around me, I feel like I got saddled with the worst lab partner in the world.
Of the myriad garbled mutterings that spew forth from Edgardo’s mouth, it is unfortunate that his paranoia about crime is not one of them. He knows how to say “Watch your shit” in English as well as he does in Spanish. I can feel us being overheard as my bunkmates climb into their squeaky beds. I can sense them bristle in the dark, as they’ve nothing better to do than listen to our conversation. I worry that by sheer association with Edgardo, I will be the victim of punitive theft or molestation. The latter of which would be welcome so long as the molesting process consists of a vigorous foot rubbing.
“Keep all of your eyes on my stuff,” Edgardo practically shouts.
He gestures at my borrowed backpack, which also happens to have his new climbing helmet strapped to it. Go to sleep but also watch his stuff? Sleep with one eye open? That’s more of an expression than a possibility.
“And what is this?” He points at my bunk.
“What is what?”
I can’t imagine to what he’s referring. The bare mattress you’d cross the street to avoid if you saw it in New York? But then he plucks a small leather case from my bed. Along with my dwindling bottle of water and sleeping bag, that’s all I have on me.
“You have too many things,” he says, gesturing at my series of invisible steamer trunks. “We need to go light.” He rattles the leather case in my face. “You need this?”
“Yes.” I grab it back. “I do.”
“It goes in the backpack.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
Everyone in the room not magically asleep by 7 p.m. is hushed and listening, waiting for the squall to pass.
“Fine,” I hiss. “You want to do this? Let’s do this.”
I mumble under my breath as I open the case. My thumbs are numb. There has to be as much of a male aversion to open discussion of feminine hygiene on this continent as there is on mine. I hold up three tampons, fanning them out like cards. Or scissors. Scissors for hands. Edgardo squints at them, momentarily confounded by the foreign packaging. Recognition sets in.
“Okay, okay,” he says.
“Okay?” I snap.
Great. Now I’ve completely blown my chances at molestation. A Frenchman on the bunk next to mine starts snickering and Edgardo glares at him. The Frenchman rolls over in his sleeping bag, where he whispers to his partner on the other side. At one point in the night I shake so uncontrollably, I climb down to the ground and move my whole bunk a few inches away so as not to put his bed on vibrate.
* * *
The following cannot be overstated: Had I known what I was getting into, the thing I would have left home with—my emotional EpiPen—is a friend. Someone I trusted. Someone I had slept with. Someone who already knew my name. Someone to whom I owed money and who thus had a vested interest in seeing me make it off Cotopaxi in one piece. All the mountain-climbing accounts I have read post-Cotopaxi seem to say the same thing: You’d be an idiot to climb a major mountain alone. More than experiencing dehydration as your feet punch through the very substance that might otherwise hydrate you, loneliness is one of the elements. And no mountain guide in the world, good or bad, can protect you from that.
There is a rip in Pedro’s sleeping bag. As the night ticks on, I want to spread the extra fleece jacket lent to me by the Seattle guide over my already layered body, maybe stick my hands in the sleeve ends. But every time I move to retrieve the fleece, the sleeping bag rips a little more. The rip is cunning, a worthy adversary. It will not be tricked by me slowly lifting my knees or gradually extending an arm down from the side.
Frustrated, dizzy, and desperate to get to the outhouse, finally I just sit up. The rip shows no mercy and now runs the full length of the sleeping bag. When I return, I have to clamp it shut between my knees. I experiment with comfort, using my forearm as a pillow. But the skin exposed by being forced out of the sleeping bag gets cold too quickly. It’s unacceptable for my hands to be anywhere but my armpits or between my legs. I think of the expression “chilled to the bone” and wonder what comes after that. Chilled to the marrow? Then what? If you hit the center of the center of the center, do you just start blowing icicles out your nose? I think again of my apartment in July. My goal is to convince myself that it’s too hot for sleep, that I have just kicked the comforter to the ground and a simple sheet is oppressive to my skin. I strain to hear the sound of that summer rain falling on metal.
If a beetle could survive up here, I would see its breath.
Around 3 a.m., I sit up in a panic, clutching my throat. I had started drifting off. This would have been a good thing if I wasn’t also displaying the first signs of altitude sickness. Anyone who has ever been awake and then gone to sleep is familiar with the concept of slowed breathing. But if you’re already struggling to breathe, slipping into slumber feels like an invisible force is trying to choke the life out of you. I look around me at the occupied mattresses and sigh in a pitiable fashion. I’m dehydrated and losing iron to a little cotton finger between my legs. I touch my forehead, disturbed by how good it feels to have this abnormally cold part of my body comfort this abnormally hot part of my body. I lie awake, wheeze, and wait, watching Edgardo’s new helmet not move on the floor below. I wonder again about the weight of inexperience. What percentage of this is my fault? How much of this is my ignorance and how much of it is the mountain’s difficulty? It feels like guessing beans in a jar.
Just before midnight a dainty chorus of digital watch alarms commences. Headlamps are flicked on as, one by one, climbers yawn in various languages. Now, a normal person—and I like to include myself in this category whenever possible—might have stayed in bed at this juncture. Especially with some ilk of ailment that feels akin to going on a carousel with a hangover. But I am here and I can’t not be here. Climbing and not climbing somehow feel like the same thing.
As I come downstairs, I clutch a railing with one hand and an “I’m still drunk and might throw up on the subway” plastic bag in the other. I see that the doctor and his expedition have already gone. Climbers gear up around me, talking about how the conditions have been iffy. There’s a storm that could get worse. Some people are concerned about a particularly avalanche-prone bend in the terrain. Unfortunately, I don’t have the mental palate to discern what “iffy” means. Not until we start our ascent.
This climb is not terribly different from yesterday’s, save for the fact that it’s pitch-black. At first everything is still, the mountain equivalent of a man-made lake at night. But soon the wind starts coming after us and brings with it an especially overpowering brand of sleet. I don’t so much feel like I’m on the movie set of a snowstorm as on the movie set of a snowstorm that’s being blown away by an actual snowstorm. Over the icy ground and into the dark, the other groups move ahead. Pedro and Edgardo are forced to wait for me. I move slower than a Galápagos turtle and am generally a total drag.
“Come on!” shouts Edgardo.
“I’m honestly going to kill you!” I shout back, adding a singsongy “Fuck your mother” for my own benefit.
To keep myself going, I count to five as I step, then start over. Also of assistance is following the spotlight of my headlamp as it points down. I start counting the bounces of light as I plunge one foot in front of the other. I am, I believe, just above 16,000 feet above sea level. To be clear, around 17,000 feet is the height at which you’re liable to believe your companion is an orange and attempt to peel him.
Still, I press on, thinking I will be able to outsmart such delusions. You see, We, the People of Sea Level, have a tough time believing in externally induced insanity. You say you’re born with the sociopathic strain that compels you to burn ants with a magnifying glass? Sure, fine, whatever. Be crazy. But if you are not this person, if you are more or less regular, we will spend the rest of your life teaching you to believe in the power of your mind over the matter of your body. This belief is vital to our existence. We use it for dieting and productivity and heartbreak and exhaustion. Physical pain is the body’s retort to such hubris. Control was an illusion. You were having a lucid dream, my friend. What the mind really is, is a Tupperware container full of leftover noodles.
* * *
I once sat next to a man on a plane who had climbed Everest and thus had stood approximately 900 feet below the level of our seats. He went with his wife, a champion mountain climber famous in Eastern Europe, as well as several professional guides. They were equipped with all the tents and oxygen tanks money could buy. Still, one never knows how one will react in an environment about as hospitable to humans as the bottom of the ocean. I imagine this is part of the thrill of mountain climbing if you are remotely experienced and already 90 percent sure of how you’ll respond to specific conditions. The rest is a reasonable margin for the unknown. This man’s wife had a bronchial infection within that margin. One thing led to another, which led to her almost choking to death on a piece of her own lung. She turned blue and had to be carried to a tent where one of the guides felt her pulse and mistakenly pronounced her dead. The man was confused.
“I said, ‘What do you mean, my wife is dead?’ and the guide said, ‘She’s not breathing.’”
“And then what did you do?” I asked, enraptured.
This man and I had bonded over a hostile flight attendant when we boarded. For the next few hours, he was as good as family. I leaned on our shared armrest and put my chin in my palm.
“I said … ‘Okay.’”
“What? That’s it?!”
He explained that the unholy trinity of exhaustion, cold, and reduced oxygen can lead to extreme calm. It’s not that you can’t think straight, it’s that you can only think straight. There is no emotion, just a slow and methodical logic mirroring the crunch of your steps. One foot in front of the other. The man’s wife was not breathing, which meant she must be dead and he wanted to know what came next. Still, I knew some part of him must have been devastated at the idea of losing his wife. He considered this.
“I might have also said, ‘That’s not good.’”
As for Cotopaxi, it is only like Everest in that it’s got snow on it. And it’s higher than wherever you are right now, unless you’re reading this on an airplane. Climbing Cotopaxi is something that gets done daily, whereas about 5,000 people total have summited Everest. With the possible exception of watching an Inside the Actors Studio marathon, conquering Everest is the most difficult thing a human being can do. And yet as I push forward in the dark, I imagine a colossal 747 airplane swinging by to pick me up where I stand. It slows down just long enough for me to lasso my climbing rope over the wing and takes me somewhere with mugs of hot chocolate.
At the next bend, one of the headlights ahead of me pauses and shines backward in my direction. It waits for the distance between us to close. Edgardo’s ponytail is covered in snow. It looks gray.
“Okay?” he asks, meaning “If the answer’s not ‘yes,’ I wash my hands of you.”
I say nothing for a second, struggling to breathe. I don’t like going for a light jog and chatting at the same time. I lean on my knees and wheeze.
“I think my legs are bigger than my lungs,” I say.
“I don’t understand this,” he says.
Neither do I, I think. My unacclimatized ass lasts approximately twenty more minutes in the dark before huddling over at 17,500 feet. I make the volcano an offering of partially digested beans. I am not the first to puke on this glacier and I won’t be the last. I can taste the bitterness of the malaria pill.
One’s instinct, when depending on something faulty, is to immediately stop depending on that thing. It only takes a moment of balancing a refrigerator on stilts to realize it’s time to put the refrigerator elsewhere. But to have there be no “elsewhere,” to have your body betray you, is a frightening sensation. You want an extra heart to help this one pump blood. But there is no extra heart. It’s like going through a breakup and wanting to talk about your distress with the person who just dumped you.
I wipe my face with snow and tilt my head back. Between gusts of white is a deep black sky. Imposing ice formations rise like monuments in the distance. Cotopaxi’s crater will have to be stunning for everyone but me.
I am done here.
With Pedro in tow, Edgardo and I make our way down the mountain. My fevered brain finds the language barrier disproportionately comical and every time Edgardo shouts at me over the wind, I have to sit down and laugh until I can’t breathe. This only irritates him more. Back at the refuge, I request that he rifle through the Baltimore doctor’s things for a thermometer. He looks appalled. Edgardo sincerely thinks I’d like to steal from my bunkmates. Yes, that’s right. There’s a thermometer shortage so grave in the United States, the government had me fly to Ecuador and fake altitude sickness so that I might do an undercover sweep for medical supplies. Though, to Edgardo’s credit, neither of us is a genius at this hour. Had we had our heads screwed on straight, it might have occurred to one of us to crack open the first-aid kit buried in the bottom of his backpack this entire time.
The chances of my having a fever are high, much like the fever it turns out I have. I know this because around 3 a.m., I ask Pedro why so many people are back already. He doesn’t understand what I mean.
“The headlights,” I whisper, gesturing at the wall across from my bunk, where tiny spotlights bounce on the wood.
Pedro shakes his head. I think he’s a moron. He thinks I’m a moron.
“People coming up the stairs,” I stress.
“No light,” he whispers.
Although the conditions were bad enough to cut short the summit goal for many, a fact that will make me feel like less of a wimp even as I have sworn off testosterone-fueled notions of achievement, I was the one who broke first. No one else will return for another hour.
“Oh, good,” I say, rolling over. “That’s perfect.”
I am lucid enough to be disappointed by my own insanity.
* * *
Among the defeated is the French hiker who gets down from his bunk no sooner than he catches his breath. He talks to me, telling me the occasional joke that makes me cough and muster a “Oui, c’est drôle. C’est très drôle.” He holds my shivering hand for an hour straight. It’s long enough for me to think that not only is this the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me but also the kindest thing I have ever personally witnessed someone do for a stranger. Eventually the Seattle hiker marches up to me and asks to pull my finger. From the top bunk, I see all of these people as floating heads, amateur doctors making their rounds.
“Let me see her finger,” he says to the others.
This is no time for third-grade games, sir.
He clips a heartbeat monitor to my thumb.
My heart rate is less than enthusiastic.
What has two thumbs and no pulse? This girl!
“Hmmm,” he says.
They watch as I slide the monitor from my thumb in slow motion. It snaps back together and falls to the floor. I don’t remember anyone touching my forehead but a voice announces that I’m burning up. I push myself upright.
“Okay,” I say, “what are the worst times to go down?”
Pedro lifts the top layer of his sleeping bag.
“Hey!” he says. “There’s a rip in this!”
“Probably between five and seven,” says the Seattle climber, pressing his watch to make it glow.
It’s 5 a.m. In daylight, it would take me forty minutes to get down from the refuge. In my current condition, I suspect it will take me longer than that to get down from this bunk. I decide to wait it out, which entails more nausea and an irrepressible chill. Still, it’s not like I’m dying. At least that’s what I tell my French friend when he asks me if I’m dying. I have never been asked this in a sincere fashion before. I am flattered that he thinks I would know. People who regularly push themselves to the brink of their physical limitations know what dying feels like. When I say something tastes like pennies or piss or shit, I’m not implying a frame of reference for these flavors. But these people—they eat shit for fun.
* * *
The mountain pretends not to know what it did. At sunrise, it looks perfectly innocent, as if it has just chewed my shoe and now it wants to go for a walk. Fever broken, standing outside in the quiet, I wait for Edgardo and Pedro to wake up. The refuge is perched on a ledge so that the view runs right up to my feet. Twin rainbows appear in the valleys in front of me. The contrast of green hills and snowcapped tops gives the entire region a confectionary look. The mountains themselves look like humpback whales coming up for air. It’s all so offensively pretty. There’s not a sign of last night’s storm. You could put a feather on top of the snow and it wouldn’t blow away. For a split second, I kick myself for not having climbed higher last night. This, I think, is how abusive relationships get their start.
I hear a crunch on the ground behind me.
“Imbabura,” Edgardo announces, pointing to my right.
There, surrounded by mist, is the mountain I didn’t climb. It’s the least snowcapped of the mountains. Snow yarmulked.
I nod. “It’s beautiful.”
“I take this,” Edgardo says as he grabs my backpack for me.
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it.
I am relieved to not compound the thumping in my skull by climbing down with the extra weight. Edgardo unfastens his new helmet and clips it to his own bag. Then he hands the pack back to me. When I don’t immediately take it, he ever so gently rests it against my leg.
“De nada,” he says, smiling.
* * *
When we arrive at the car, I am somehow surprised to see it there, right where we parked it. Unlike Edgardo, I did not expect it to get stolen. But I am surprised to see it so unaffected by last night’s events. By the time I reach for the door handle, my body is almost back to normal, as indifferent to Cotopaxi as the car is.
Edgardo’s foot is heavy on the gas pedal. I would sooner drink a bottle of whiskey and run down a spiral staircase than drive around with Edgardo again. But as I have neither at my disposal, I buckle up.
“Look,” Edgardo says, once we are at the base of the mountain.
“What?”
He ignores me and stops the car. At first I see nothing. Then, on the hillside, meandering between shrubs, are five spots. They’re moving slowly toward us. They are wild horses, four caramel and one black. As they get closer, I see their manes are tangled with unknowable debris. Some of their ribs show when they move. Edgardo grabs his camera from the backseat and gets out of the car to take pictures. He moves with theatrical stealth, trying not to frighten them. They remain calm, stopping to munch on long grass while keeping one eye on Edgardo. This is what he needed last night, an animal with monocular vision to watch his shit.
Our driver missing, Pedro and I get out of the Jeep, closing our doors softly behind us. We lean together, watching Edgardo creep up on the horses, trying to crouch down and move forward at the same time. The sun is bright, my breathing regular. I have done the unthinkable: unzipped my jacket. Pedro laughs at his friend under his breath and shakes his head. He takes papers out of his pocket, sprinkles some dried leaves inside and rolls a joint, expertly sealing it with his tongue. He lights it and hands it to me. As I inhale, Pedro cleans his Oakleys with his shirt, glares at the sky, and says we have to get going. It’s going to rain again. The road to the highway will be covered in mud. He removes a knife and a mango from his other pocket, cuts the mango, and eats chunks directly from the blade.
“He is heartsick,” explains Pedro, placing the knife against his chest, concerned he got the expression wrong.
He gestures at Edgardo with the knife.
“There is a woman he loves and she will not call him. So he texts her. A lot.”
The idea of Edgardo living his life, drinking, texting, going to techno nights at clubs and flirtatiously moving his ponytail down women’s faces like a paintbrush, is amusing to me.
“He lives with his mother,” Pedro continues, “but he wants to move with this woman.”
“Does she ever respond to the texts?”
“She has a new boyfriend. Edgardo knows a little but he doesn’t really know.”
From half a football field away, the wind carries the sound of Edgardo telling the horses to be “tranquilo,” which they already are. They’re not running from him nor are they charging him. They’re just casually meandering away.
“Do you know this guy?”
“He is my brother.”
“I see,” I say with a my-wife-is-dead level of energy. “That’s not good.”
“No.” Pedro laughs. “It’s not.”
He offers me the mango, which I take in exchange for the second half of the joint.
When Edgardo comes back to the car, I stare out the window, refusing to feel bad for him. I will not care who broke Edgardo’s heart or why or how badly. I am not sorry he is lonely. A lot of people are lonely. A lot of people are lonely even when they’re surrounded by other people. I am determined to deny him my empathy. But everything is thawing, inside the car and out. So when Edgardo enthusiastically shouts the names of the mountains, releasing the steering wheel to point each time the road provides a new angle, as if I have not just spent the night on one of them, as if he has not told me a million times already, I can’t help but crane my neck and nod, sufficiently awed.